To understand how my therapy went today (and I know how eager you all are to do that), you will have to learn a little about how my day went beforehand.

I got up at the usual time, and farted around on the computer (reminder : Febreze computer, then Purell. Or is it the other way around?) until around 7:30, which is the earliest we usually leave for my 8:15 am appointments with Doctor Costan.

Seeing that Joe (my roomie, my friend, my ride) is not ready yet, I sit down in front of the television, boot up the Wii and thence Netflix, and resume watching a very fascinating (and, perforce, depressing) documentary called “Bobby Fischer : Against The World”.

Fischer is a fascinating historical figure, and his life is truly tragic, and so the documentary is quite engrossing. So engrossing, in fact, that Joe ended up watching it with me instead of getting ready to drive me to my therapy appointment.

And I saw this happening, and it was making me increasingly tense. I absolutely hate being late for anything. It’s a deep part of my nature. I hate it when others are late for things and leave me in doubt and suspense and tension, and so, in order to be morally consistent, I also hate tardiness in myself.

So my tension/anxiety level is peaking, but I can’t just come out and say so, because Joe drives me to and from these weekly appointments purely out of the goodness of his heart, and well, beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

And I have been a beggar all my life.

Finally, I just turn off the Wii and say “We should get going!”.

Might not seem like much, but for me, that was a fairly significant act of assertiveness. It is very hard for me to speak up for myself in personal matters. I tend to just let things slide.

And by slide, of course, I mean fester and boil and seethe inside me until it turns into the pure poison of my deep self-loathing and depression.

Because hey, you can always take it out on yourself, right?

Anyhow, so it’s already past 8 am when we finally leave, and all the time we are driving to the appointment, I am staring at the clock as the minutes go past.

Joe, sensing my tension, begins driving aggressively, which is meant well, but I have this hunk of PTSD about driving in cars and so it only serves to make me more nervous because I am pretty sure that one thing I would hate more than being late is dying.

Even when we are driving at normal speeds, I keep having these anxiety spikes, thinking a car is about to hit us when it just happened to merge next to us, or passed too close, or whatever. It is classic PTSD, and it started the last time I was in a car accident.

And that was many years ago… so I am assuming this PTSD bullshit ain’t going anywhere. Sigh.

So you can imagine how anxious I was when we finally got there. I was all jangled and frazzled and angry with Joe for dicking around and making me late (by two whole minutes) and feeling like nobody takes me seriously or really cares about me and that is why they don’t care enough to be on time and so forth and so on and so what.

So then I finally get to the appointment…. and the secretary tells me Doctor Costan is running late and won’t be there for another ten minutes.

Now doesn’t that just figure? In theory, this could have been a good thing, like when I would be late for class in university only to find the prof wasn’t there yet.

I would just sit back and say “If he’s not here yet, then I’m not late!” After all, the class hadn’t started without me, had it?

But this time, what with my mood already foul from feeling like people had let me down, the revelation that the Doctor couldn’t be bothered to show up on time either only made things a lot worse.

I sat there thumbing through their giant Herman collection (save me with your brilliant single panel humour, Jim Unger!), and fuming, thinking about what I will say to the Doc when he shows up.

I feel bad for the people who arrived in between my arrival and the Doc’d arrival, because I probably glowered at them. Sorry folks, it wasn’t anything you did, it was just you not being Doc Costan.

So when he finally did arrive, guess what the first thing we talked about was?

If you said “how I felt about him being late”, go get yourself a cookie. Jar’s on the fridge.

So I ranted a bit about that, and talked about how I knew that feeling like people don’t care about you just because they are late is not rational, but I felt that way anyhow. I have been ignored all my life, made all the more convenient by my total lack of assertiveness, and so those issues are very raw and close to the surface, and liable to emerge at the slightest stimulus.

It really is the height of self-centeredness to take accidental things personally, I suppose.

So I vented about that to the Doc, and we got into other related things, but the most important thing that came out of it was that I expressed my anger and disappointment, and not only did the world fail to end, but he actually told be that he not only gave me permission to do it again if something is bothering me, but he actively encouraged it.

And it made me realize just how bad a problem holding myself to this impossible standard of “never taking my emotions out on others” can be, and that maintaining that kind of purity can be a poison more toxic than any snake’s venom.

Purity is its own poison.